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Unions Promise Support As #OccupyWallStreet Enters Third Week
There had been rumor on Friday that the band Radiohead would be dropping by the #OccupyWallStreet encampment. ![](/sites/commondreams.org/files/imce-images/picture_3_6_0.png ""Occupy Wall Street" protesters march and hold signs in New York City on September 17, 2011. Frustrated protesters have been speaking out against corporate greed and social inequality on and near Wall Street for the past two weeks. (CC BY SA Carwil Bjork-James)")
"Occupy Wall Street" protesters march and hold signs in New York City on September 17, 2011. Frustrated protesters have been speaking out against corporate greed and social inequality on and near Wall Street for the past two weeks. (CC BY SA Carwil Bjork-James)
They had just been on the Colbert Report, and their fan base is huge among the very demographic of younger people drawn to the protests now beginning their third week.
And so more people came than organizers expected. Loads of people! Except, alas, for Radio Head. The band had reportedly called to express support that led some to conclude that they were on the way.
This demonstrates again the power of celebrity to draw a crowd. What did impress the activists in Zuccotti Park in the financial district is that the Radiohead fans actually stuck around and took part in the activities and a march that went North to Police Headquarters protesting the pepper spraying of activists.
That police action actually persuaded the media that had convinced itself that this growing assembly was not worth covering to cover it. Soon, thanks to research by the mysterious “Anonymous” activists able to identify the police commander responsible for using a chemical weapon against female protesters.
His name is Anthony Bolongna, and soon his email was hacked and his record of alleged earlier abuse incidents was publicized, apparently with his online porn collection.
Then, Jon Stewart stepped in Thursday with a hysterical report on the cop he called “TONY BALONEY,” ridiculing him and the police force.
Perhaps, that is why the NYPD was more restrained Friday night and backed down with threatened arrests of a group of activist bicyclists called Critical Mass, that had shown up to show solidarity. When it was announced at a nightly meeting called the “General Assembly” that the bikers were at risk, hundreds of activists rushed out to show some solidarity to them--and, then, there were no arrests.
Perhaps this incident was evidence of sign I saw reading “The power of the people is greater than the people in power.”
#Occupy Wall Street has yet to attract the 20,000 militants they had hoped for but its growing and, more importantly retaining its sense of community, non-violence, and sense of a tolerant community.
Most important is that similar actions are already taking place in other cities like a March on Friday in Boston against the Bank of America. An even bigger one is being planned for Washington in October.
Other organizations are supporting this emerging movement. Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union say they “applaud the courage of the young people on Wall Street,” and are planning to turn out their members next week. I saw T Shirts of UAW members and met some activists from the Salvadorian community. Already #Occupy Wall Street sent over a hundred people to back a protest by postal workers trying to save their jobs and the Post Office.
The longer this lasts, and is allowed to last, the more it is likely to grow.
Already intellectuals and writers like Chris Hedges are praising the protesters as “the best among us” and are imploring the rest of us to get involved:
“There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt-taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler.”
Veteran activist Carl Davidson writes:
“Young rebels often manifest a moral clarity that awakens and prods the rest of us. Through their direct actions, they become a critical force, holding up a mirror for an entire society to take a look at itself, what it has come to, and what choices lay before it. The historic example is the four young African American students that sat at a lunch counter and ordered a cup of coffee in Greensboro, North Carolina back in 1960.
The Wall Street protests are thus a clarion call to the trade unions and everyone concerned with economic and social justice.”
This weekend, Occupy Wall Street is promising to make an assessment of it strengths and weaknesses and to begin a debate about next steps.
The last two weeks have been a tremendous learning experience for the activists who even doubted their staying power. Now their non-organization has organized with a food committee, media center, sanitation department and task force to encourage more debate.
David Degraw of AmpedStatus.com that pushed for the protests sees the movement defining itself. He told me on my weekly News Dissector Radio Show on Progressive Radio Network that he expects more clarity to emerge from a debate that’s already underway.
He writes, “As the occupation of Wall Street moves into its third week, there are many questions about the organizers behind the ongoing protests and the origins of the 99% Movement.”
He has encountered resistance from parties unknown to his efforts to encourage a debate. “As AmpedStatus was pushing for a decentralized global rebellion against Wall Street and actively supporting the Egyptian uprising against the IMF and Federal Reserve, the attacks on the site escalated. In what appeared to be a fatal blow, the entire ISP network that the AmpedStatus.com site was hosted on was knocked offline, hundreds of sites were also affected and the AmpedStatus.com web hosting provider said that they would no longer be able to host the site unless it was moved to a service that was significantly more than we were paying or could afford. With a very limited budget, and in complete desperation, AmpedStatus put out a call for help.”
The computer whiz Anonymous stepped in and helped the site recover. It is now on the leading edge of the movement. Other sites like Livestream carry the events around the clock the way Al Jazeera reported on the uprising in Egypt. #OccupyWallStreet disseminates tweets around the clock
Many in the media wrote off the young people in Egypt, and proved to be as out of touch as much of the American media is today. As Bob Dylan sang decades ago to a reporter from Time Magazine, “There’s something happening and you don’t know what it us, do you…”
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8 Comments so far
Show AllA call to Led Zeppelin: Please make a cover of Stairway to Heaven dedicated to Occupy Wall Street
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9TGj2jrJk8
Pink Floyd
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkhX5W7JoWI
Come on guys - time to give back! These folks are proving you having seen the truth and speaking about it.
Has Tony Baloney become the new icon of police brutality ?
Such icons often help the public remember incidents and not support such sociopath behavior.
hey, protesters, you rock! keep it up--you can visualize the many more that wish they could get there. Maybe start a food fund on ActBlue or something so we can contribute more.
Do entertainers draw people who are truly interested in being there or just those who want to be entertained for a moment? Sounds like another PR stunt for a band.
Now the unions want a piece of the action. something they couldn't get before. Given what they did a few weeks ago, things could get violent with them barging themselves into the mix on Wall Street.
This movement has all the markings of something very real, with real potential. Maybe some union energy will pump it up a notch, though I'm wary of thugs injecting themselves into a peaceful protest.
At first I wanted to hear more clear demands from the Occupy Wall Street kids. But now I think they are smart to keep the powers that be guessing while this movement picks up steam in NYC and around the country. Once that movement has 3 to 5 million dedicated members willing to put numbers in the streets for the long haul, then their demands will ring with much stronger resonance and command both corporate media and political attention.
But any big push behind this movement, in NYC and nationally, must come with large scale union support in the streets--not just at a few quick big events, but for weeks and months--as long as it takes.
Even at 7% of the workforce, America still has enough union members (plus union supporters among their dependents) to apply some SERIOUS counterweight against the fascists now running the economic, political and mass media Roman Circus--at the State and Federal levels in much of the country.
The AFL-CIO alone has 11 million members. Throw in the UAW, AFSCME, the teachers unions, the nurse's unions, the skilled trades unions (electricians, plumbers, masons, etc.), the Hollywood unions, etc., plus their supporting dependents and you begin to see what could come together.
America's unions just need to realize and organize that power across multiple unions and throw off their fat, overpaid, corporately co-opted leadership where it exists. Only the unions working together with the rest of left-of-DLC America can put MILLIONS in the street in Washington D.C., NYC and around the corporatist, militarist mass media HQs--and keep the pressure up for as long as it takes. And that's EXACTLY what we need.
We need to be able to create the logistics (food, water, sanitation, critical protest shelter in sympathetic citizens' homes and elsewhere, medical care for protesters brutalized by rogue cops, bailout & legal defense funds for protesters, etc.) to put, in my opinion, close to two million protesters at every major event we focus upon and keep them there for months at a time if need be.
We need clear, short, easily understood lists of demands for each event attended by over a million people--three to five demands. We need to simultaneously develop and use, to the greatest extent possible as soon as possible, OUR OWN MASS MEDIA to get our messages out without having to go through corporatist, militarist, blindly pro-Wall Street mass media filters & censors. Low power FM radio station licenses for non-profit organizations will be opened up by the FCC for the first time in 30 years next summer.
Get your non-profit organization ready now to get those licenses and snap up those LPFM radio stations before the right-wingers and "Christian" fundamentalists do. Start building the local grass roots funding and wealthy donor lists for those stations ahead of time. We've got to truly hit the movement's own mass media ground running next year.
We should replicate the DemocracyNow/WRFG indie radio/online streaming model ten thousand fold across the country as soon as possible. I mean blanket medium & large cities with these stations with contiguous broadcast ranges that penetrate the same mass audience market footprints as the corporate FM Big Boys as soon as humanly possible. I believe this is urgently important to give the Occupy Together movement long-lasting wings. Without our own media the corporatist militarist media will ultimately divide and conquer us again. That is what it is designed to do in Orwellian perpetuity. That is why we need our own truly grass roots public affairs mass media in perpetuity to act as a counterweight against their endless 24/7/365 infotainment propaganda stream.
Lastly, the surveillance/Police State that treacherous Republicans and Democrats have assembled over the last 20 years in anticipation of rising civil suffering and civil unrest that their policies deliberately set in motion is designed to fully exploit Americans' over-dependence on electronic communications. Critical protest-related communications should be person-to-person between at least reasonably well-known (and preferably very well known) fellow activists and union members.
We need to get off our asses and start meeting each other face to face in small and large meetings like the old union organizers did in the days before telephones--you know, to actually get to know each other as intelligent, sensitive, flesh and blood human beings to raise our level of commitment. We need to publicly reassert the old but effective tactic of public speaking in public spaces with plenty of muscle to protect the speakers--especially outside areas were lots of non-unionized labor go to work. We need pamphleteers and folks to walk with and protect them, too.
One of the most wonderful aspects of the Occupy Wall Street micro-movement has been the EXCELLENT posters that have been created in support of it. I already have a collection of about 25 of them.
AMERICAN ARTISTS, MUSICIANS AND PLAYWRIGHTS AWAKE! NOW IS YOUR TIME TO FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT USING ALL YOUR CREATIVITY WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT!
"Don't fear the media; BECOME the media!"
-- Jello Biafra
I hear you!!! Doubleplus good!!!
Another misleading headline. A few union locals are bravely offering support -- but the Hoffas and Trumkas out there are making sure that thee is no support at the national level.
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David DeGraw, mentioned and quoted in this article is a pretty interesting guy, and has connections inside the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Check out a recent article he wrote about the origins and general philosophy of the movement at the link below:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26864